Date: 01/01/2016
Accepted
A web application needs to usable and reasonably presentable to get people to use it. Given that CSS/Design are not my deepest skillset, a framework that will help provide reasonable style and UI abstractions will help focus learning.
Frameworks like Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation are extremely popular and evolving. They come with Javascript helpers to help provide functionality, though were not designed with the intent of using with React.
This choice was admittedly made for convience and is slightly arbitrary (and perhaps a bit risky).
Semantic-UI was chosen for simplicity and existing cards abstraction which may be helpeful to an application having Kanban-board style functionality.
I also found multiple accounts of people using it with React with minimal hassle, given the claim from the Semantic UI integrations page:
Semantic UI components are designed to be compatible with libraries that tightly manage UI lifecycle like React. No special bindings are needed.
Most components use mutation observers to watch for changes in internal state, and all components are built with initialize, refresh and destroy methods which will regenerate, refresh cached values, and teardown components.
Semantic-UI seems to be reasonably complete and actively supported, but is not as popular as others.
There appears to be a dependency on jQuery within the Semantic-UI Javascript, so it comes along for the ride.
There are also some complaints about lacking support for accessibility, which is of concern and may need to be replaced if the app gains significant traction.